More information on MS12-004

This month we released MS12-004 to address CVE-2012-0003 and CVE-2012-0004.

CVE-2012-0003

The most severe of these vulnerabilities is CVE-2012-0003 which is a Critical, Remote Code Execution vulnerability. This CVE affects all editions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Windows 7 is not affected by this vulnerability.

An effective workaround for CVE-2012-0003 is to disable Directshow’s MIDI parsing. Apply the following registry file would unregister the MIDI parser in Directshow.

CVE-2012-0004 is an Important-class vulnerability also involving Windows Media Player. The vulnerability in the closed caption decoding component (L21 decoder) is contained within DirectShow. Therefore, the multimedia applications that leverage DirectShow to decode closed caption streams might be affected.

As a mitigation, the latest WMP player, WMP12, has closed caption turned off by default. As shown in the below picture, the setting to display close caption content is disabled. Therefore, WMP12 users are not affected by this vulnerability by default.

Summary

MS12-004 is our top-priority bulletin for January 2012; though the mitigation described above is effective and we have seen no exploitation attempts against either of the CVEs covered, we recommend that customers apply the bulletin as soon as possible.

Special thanks to Jeremy Tinder in MSRC and Ali Rahbar in MSRC Engineering.